


back/story

by llassah



Category: Slings and Arrows
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 21:19:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/llassah/pseuds/llassah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ellen has many different stories about how she met Geoffrey Tennant. Some of them are even true.</p>
            </blockquote>





	back/story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wintercreek](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wintercreek/gifts).



He has dreams again. Dreams he has to wake her up and tell her about. They’ve had the touring company for a few months now; things are starting to look a little more stable, but his mind’s throwing up strange things still. It’s not madness: he was never really mad. It’s just that his mind has probably never worked in the way normal minds work. He’s her Scheherazade, whispering dreams in the small hours of the morning, dreams that are sometimes unsettling, sometimes mundane. Always about them, always about their first meeting. She listens, too sleepy to process them properly. He’s forgotten by morning, and she never reminds him of them. He’s dreaming a history that is fitter for a play than their own one, a neater one. Perhaps when his mind has exhausted the possibilities of the meeting, he’ll move on to the marriage, the children, or the tragic ending that didn’t end in an asylum and years of silence. Something a little grander.

_‘We were at a ball. You had your hair in ringlets, and I wore a cape. Our eyes met across the room and you blushed. We danced all night without tire. It was like Cinderella- we were younger, but you looked the same as now, and I fell so deeply in love it hurt.’_

They met in steps, out of sync with each other. She saw him first, sitting on the doorstep of a bookshop, smoking a badly rolled spliff. He was wearing a leather jacket, underpants, combat boots and nothing else. His attention was focussed on the newspaper he had on his lap. She hurried to her lecture, put the incident out of her mind. The class was on Pinter, so her mind wandered to his untidy hair, the intensity of his concentration.

He first saw her when she threw a glass of red wine over one of the senior professors in the English department, an ardent deconstructionist and notorious libertine. He told her afterwards that he couldn’t help but admire a woman with the ability to cover a white shirt so thoroughly.

_ ‘So...this kid, Titus, is he...I mean...’_

_‘Don’t be so bourgeois, Geoffrey. He’s my bastard. His mother is a book reviewer. I met her at a Damien Hirst exhibition, which I had gone to as a protest, of course. I drank too much champagne, and was sick in her handbag, and had a night of ill advised, clumsy, unsatisfying sex, the result of which is currently on your lap. She was perfect. Is perfect. I’m so happy, Tennant. So very, very happy.’_

_‘That’s...congratulations?’ _

_‘Congratulations? I can’t fucking write, Ellen! Can’t direct for shit, the last good idea I had was three fucking years ago, and that was for a Thomas the Tank Engine stage play, which, incidentally, was rejected by every fucking producer I sent it to, the venal moneygrubbing bastards. I’m happy! It’s shit! At least with you two you got some creative fucking torment out of it! You probably met at a slaughter house or something. We met at an art exhibition of the most vapid, commercialized dickbag who has ever preserved a cow. Dear God, it might as well have been at a museum! Or a fucking Shakespeare play! That means I’m more hackneyed than you two, and I thought that wasn’t possible. At least he strangled a swan for you.’_

_‘I’m not proud of that,’ _

_‘I’m leaving. You can offer me no comfort. You’re probably fucking happy too.’_

_‘Does he even remember how we met, Geoff?’_

_‘I told him once that you had saved me from the amorous clutches of a gang of truckers. He believed me.’_

Darren was there when they first met, talking to Geoffrey-or rather, challenging him to one of their by that point legendary duels. It was at one of Oliver’s parties, to which he invited people he wanted to sleep with, and people he disliked. It meant that his soirees were never boring, which even then he feared more than death. She had somehow become trapped in conversation with a nihilist called Kevin, who washed once a week, and kept waxing lyrical about the joy of not being joyful or enthusiastic.

Frantically looking for a way out of the conversation, she manoeuvred them over to where Geoffrey was arranging a time and location for the duel, and proceeded to greet him enthusiastically, as if they were old friends. With tongues. Geoffrey, being the consummate actor he was, responded with alacrity. Even after Kevin the nihilist had found another ear to bend, they continued to kiss. Darren didn’t leave, but stood there watching them with an expression that almost passed for bored. They stumbled to his dorm room, all three of them, and had a night that none of them refer to, but seems to be the subtext of every one of their conversations.

They had done none of the normal exchanging of addresses after That Night. Darren and Geoffrey had spent half an hour arguing about which kind of sword to use, duelling pistols had been raised and mooted, and bare knuckle fighting was dismissed as the manifestation of Geoffrey’s unhealthy fixation on the writings of Hazlitt. Ellen had just dozed, sated, wondering how Oliver, who was in her Pinter class, would react to this development. Then, when Darren remembered she was there, all other concerns became secondary, That Night became That Morning, and it took them three days to surface, stubble-burned and shellshocked.

_I met you in a war torn city, in the rubble. I was on horseback, you had a dagger in your back pocket and a Molotov cocktail in your hand. I had a letter sealed with the king’s stamp, and you just looked at me with eyes I couldn’t read._

Kate’s with them as they tour. It feels a little odd, still, to talk to her woman to woman, but there is no place for ingénues when they are travelling in a minibus and sharing space with the scenery.  Kate is dividing her time between film auditions and touring, and it seems to work, or at least to not be going horribly wrong. In theatre, of course, the two are far too close for comfort. Jack is here, too, but they have thus far disguised him so heavily on stage that none of the gutter press know. Ellen has discovered in herself a joy for applying hideously aging make up to young faces, that Geoffrey calls ‘applied Schadenfreude’. He plays crones and nurses, and relishes it. They gather up old friends as they tour provincial theatres, putting on the sort of productions that give Darren apoplexy, but they are honest, and the words feel like coming home. She watches from the side of the stage as Miranda becomes Ferdinand’s wonder, as Helen launches a thousand ships, as Juliet becomes entangled in war by falling in love. There are no meetings for the matron or the nurse.

_I dreamt I could fly, and you could too, but everyone else wanted to stop us. It was so fucking stupid how much I wanted it to be true- you had a flaming sword, and I thought you had wings too._

People ask them, when she manages to get Geoffrey to submit to the pressing need to attend dinner parties once in a while, how they met. The middle part’s the more interesting bit, surely, and it’s more a series of entanglements and estrangements than a linear progression, but still. How did they meet? The answer changes, depending on who answers it, and what sort of people are there. Geoffrey’s answers are invariably thinly veiled references to plays- _‘I got lost during a snowstorm and ended up in British Columbia, and she was there in a logging community. She’d never set eyes on any man other than her father before’- ‘she was pretending to be a boy, and I didn’t know. I know! But she was a convincing boy, actress you know, and anyway, I used her to take letters to this standoffish girl I was trying to woo’- ‘well, our families never really got on. Hated each other, in fact’_ -‘_she couldn’t get a husband, so her father asked me to see if I could do anything to make her less of a harridan’-_delivered with a wide-eyed expression of innocence that makes him look half insane, half believable. She just shrugs, says ‘well, he swept me off my feet,’ and they make sure they give each other fond looks afterwards, consummate performers.

_You kissed me as if you had known me for years, as I talked about prop swords with a man I couldn’t stand. I loved you from that moment._

 

 


End file.
